Invasive plants are the ones that don’t play well with others. They steal their neighbors’ food and water, and they refuse to share. And you’ll see them all around the Baltimore area: vines smothering stream banks and blanketing entire trees; the brambles tangling and choking the understory; the annuals carpeting the forest floor. They’re the botanical version of an alien invasion.

Or, they can make nice additions to our gardens. Vanessa Beauchamp, an invasive plant ecologist, tells me about a hiker who came upon her research team in a park outside Baltimore. “She asked us what we’re doing, and we explained we’re studying this invasive grass that we think is a really big problem, and we’re trying to understand more about its ecology. And she says, ‘Oh my gosh that stuff is so pretty, I dug up a bunch and planted it in my yard.’”

A wavyleaf basketgrass carpet

The plant was wavyleaf basketgrass, a native of Europe and Asia. It sounds innocent enough, like a prairie grass that might rustle softly in a summer breeze. And it’s pretty enough, too, with intensely green leaves that unfurl on either side of a central shoot, and a head of spiky seeds that sticks up a foot or so above the ground. The seeds are the problem, though—they hitch rides on pant legs, animals, basically anything that comes by—and disperse to new locations that way. The plant can grow just fine even in the deep shade of a mature forest. In Patapsco Valley State Park, where it was discovered in the mid-1990s, it now carpets acres of forest floor. The Maryland Department of Natural Resources launched a war on it but lost, due to lack of funding. Now the plant has spread to other parks in the area, and experts like Beauchamp fear there may be no containing it.

A seed head

But if it’s green and pretty, what’s the worry? Beauchamp says it’s all about the community of life in the forest. Exotic plants like basketgrass are newcomers to this community, so nothing has evolved to eat them—a lesson Beauchamp has learned firsthand. “When we worked on wavyleaf basketgrass, we literally spent the summer crawling around on the forest floor. I figured we would just be tick city,” she says. Instead, of the half dozen people on her crew, “We got one tick between all of us. I mean, that’s insane.”

Few of us would be sad to see the ticks disappear. But without the thousands of insects, worms, mites, and spiders that make their living in the forest understory, the woods would be a vastly different—and less lively—place. “Nobody’s looked at how insects are able to use this grass…We see very little insect damage on the grass at all. We see no deer damage,” says Beauchamp. “If there’s no insects eating them, there’s no birds eating those insects, and up and up and up.”

A wavyleaf basketgrass army

Beauchamp moved to Towson University in Baltimore from Arizona five years ago. For an invasive species expert, the move meant more than packing and unpacking boxes—it meant abandoning one biome and learning a new one. Luckily for Beauchamp, Maryland has no shortage of invasive plants, and it didn’t take her long to find one she could claim as her own. “I came across this wavyleaf basketgrass that nobody knew anything about, and I said ‘All right. That’s mine.’”

One of the questions Beauchamp is asking is how aggressive the grass actually is. Many writers on the Web claim it crowds out other plant species, but Beauchamp wonders whether it might just take advantage of openings on the forest floor, especially those created by Maryland’s massive plant-munching deer population. To test how competitive wavyleaf basketgrass is, her research team is growing the grass in a greenhouse alongside other native and invasive grasses, and seeing which puts on the most weight. They hope to have results soon.

Beauchamp’s dog, with seeds

Beauchamp is also trying to figure out how the seeds disperse. And she thinks she’s found a suspect: pet dogs. When hikers let their dogs run through a basketgrass patch, they “come out looking like a chia pet,” says Beauchamp. Fore more precision, she had her students count the number of seeds sticking to a dog. “We found that a single dog going through this grass for 30 seconds can get over 2000 seeds on it,” she says.

Dogs may not be the only culprit, though; Beauchamp also has her eye on deer. She and her team tested this hypothesis in a rather macabre way: they got severed deer legs from a meat processor, and “walked” the legs through a basketgrass patch. Again, the legs came out covered in seeds.

But Beauchamp admits she can’t answer the most important questions: how much wavyleaf basketgrass is there, and where? “I have absolutely no number to tell you in terms of how many acres this grass covers in Maryland,” she say. “None.” Unfortunately, when she wrote a grant to fund a project that would get at such a number, she got caught in a chicken-and-egg situation: the review panel rejected the proposal, saying Beauchamp and colleagues hadn’t demonstrated how much of a threat the grass poses. “But if I don’t have any money to study it, how can I demonstrate that?” she asks.

“Walking” the deer legs

So like any good scientist, she’s gotten creative. She mustered a “wavyleaf basketgrass army” of undergraduates and high school teachers to go out and count plants in different locations. She’s also teaming with a Catonsville Community College professor who’s developing a smartphone app that will allow anybody to report a basketgrass sighting, along with GPS coordinates. Beauchamp is hoping the data her team and concerned citizens collect will convince funders and policymakers that the grass is worth studying on a larger scale.

Beauchamp vs. basketgrass

Beauchamp versus basketgrass is the latest chapter in a long saga of human battles against invasive plants. And so far the invaders have scored most of the victories. Here in Maryland, English ivy, Japanese stilt-grass, mile-a-minute weed (an Asian species known as “kudzu of the north”), and other exotics have become far more familiar sights in our parks and forests than most of our native plants. Will wavyleaf basketgrass join this list of dubious characters, or could this be the time we outsmart the weed?

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4 Comments on “An Ecologist Takes on an Invader”

Interesting topic and great post! I wonder how effective inasive plant removal is. It’s such a massive problem. I wonder if sometimes we are making the problem worse, at least for wildlife, by ripping out plants. I’d love to see a post on this sometime. I read “The Rambunctious Garden” which suggested that if given enough time, the habitats tend to sort things out on their own. But it would need a really long time. Not sure if that’s true.

[…] a year in control efforts. They’ve colonized huge swaths of the mid-Atlantic, where I live; I’ve written about them on this very blog. But is it possible that some introduced plants could prove beneficial in their new […]

[…] a year in control efforts. They’ve colonized huge swaths of the mid-Atlantic, where I live; I’ve written about them on this very blog. But is it possible that some introduced plants could prove beneficial in their new […]